Interdisciplinary Dickens

Literary Explorations are Just a CLiC Away! Dr Michaela Mahlberg on the CLiC Dickens Project

This review is contributed by Mads Golding, a playwright, writer, and independent scholar who focuses on Charles Dickens and the long 19th century. She is a staff writer for The Dickens Society. Dr. Michaela Mahlberg spoke at the 28th annual Dickens Society Conference to announce...

CFP: Write for The Dickens Society Blog!

The Dickens Society Blog is under new editorship! Dr Katie Bell and Michelle Crowther (not pictured in the illustration above) are looking for engaging submissions from scholars at all career stages on any aspect of Dickensian research. We particularly welcome posts from researchers new to...

Dispatches from the 26th Symposium: Charles Dickens and Peter Pitchlynn

Contributed by Spencer Dodd, PhD Student, Louisiana State University. Recent years have seen significant scholarly interest in Dickens and race, a trend continued by the 2021 Virtual Dickens Symposium, which featured multiple papers analyzing Dickens’s works in the context of racial issues. While these papers...

Nineteenth-century painting of a gentleman having his tooth pulled by a dentist. A dog barks in fright and two customers watch from the doorway

Dental Afterlives: Dickens and Victorian Dentistry

This post is contributed by Eleanor C. Faulkner, PhD student in the department of English and Drama at Queen Mary University, London. Our culture has inherited unsavoury dental practitioners. These include those pilloried by Charlie Chaplin’s silent film ‘Laughing Gas’ (1914), the films Marathon Man...

Dickens and the Carceral Archipelago

This post has been contributed by Spencer Dodd, University of Wisconsin-Stout. See more posts in response to the 24th Annual Dickens Society Symposium here and here. Prisons loom large in the landscapes of Dickens, standing as discrete, foreboding edifices within the quintessentially “Dickensian” backdrop of...

Interdisciplinary Dickens, 14-16 July 2017

The following post by Chris Dickinson and Laurena Tsudama provides a summary of the 2017 Dickens Society symposium, Interdisciplinary Dickens. Submit your abstract for our 2018 symposium, Dickens and Language, taking place 30 July to 1 August 2018 in Tübingen, here. The 22nd annual Dickens Society...

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view”: Adapting Middlemarch in the Information Age

In this post, Emily Bell (@EmilyJLB) interviews Rebecca Shoptaw (@rebecca_ish) about her web series of Middlemarch. The Dickens Project’s annual ‘Dickens Universe’ event will this year be focusing on Middlemarch instead of the usual Dickens novel, breaking with tradition for the first time in its...

Charles Dickens and Barnaby Rudge: The First Description of Williams Syndrome?

This post has been contributed by Darren Eblovi, MD, MPH and Christopher Clardy, MD. In 1961, J.C.P. Williams described four patients with common atypical facial features, heart defects, and intellectual disability. Williams syndrome, as this condition has since been named, is caused by a genetic...

Dickens Society Blog: Call for Posts

The Dickens Society blog is aimed at disseminating Dickensian research both amongst the Society’s membership and to the larger academic community. We welcome ongoing submissions from researchers at any career level on any topic relating to Dickens’s life, work, or world – if you would...